In March 1896, Louise and Lorne reached a milestone: their silver wedding anniversary. While lavish gifts piled up at Kensington Palace, the couple spent the culmination of twenty-five years of marriage apart. On the anniversary itself, Louise was in Cannes, on board the royal yacht Britannia with Bertie, and Lorne was with a large party staying at Sandringham with Alix. In the 1920s, Colin F. McFarlane, who had been tutor to one of Princess Louise’s nieces, recorded the following entry in his diary:
They talked too of the Duchess of Argyll who was from the first the rebel of the Queen’s family, taking always her own line and refusing to be led or driven. When her Silver Wedding Day came, she was abroad, no one knew where, not even her husband who was staying at Sandringham. The Queen gave him a silver rose-bowl which he forgot as he was leaving till Aunt Alix came out with it at the last moment saying: ‘Better not forget your pot, Lorne’.
Shortly after their un-shared anniversary, Louise went off on another holiday without her husband, taking her friend Maggie Ponsonby (daughter of Sir Henry Ponsonby).
That year, Louise was working on an interesting new project. When the Duke of Argyll had told his children that he would need to sell off some of his properties, Lorne had bought Rosneath Castle in Argyll and Bute and its surrounding land (home to many dependent tenants). Although the property was ostensibly purchased by Lorne, the money used to buy it was Louise’s. It rankled with Lorne that Louise therefore made the decisions about their new home, but everyone was in agreement that Lorne had no idea of style (his lack of fashion sense had become a joke amongst his friends and family).
Louise had become an admirer of the work of the architect Edward (‘Ned’) Lutyens, and was keen to commission him to renovate the castle and the local pub, the Ferry Inn, to which she wanted him to add an extra wing. Queen Victoria was scandalised when she discovered how familiar Princess Louise was with the locals in the pub and that she proposed in future staying at the small house next to the refurbished Ferry Inn if she was in Rosneath on her own, so that she didn’t have to go to the inconvenience of opening up the big house. When a cartoon appeared in Punch depicting Louise serving behind the bar, with the local for whom she was drawing a pint saying ‘A pint please and how’s your old mother?’ the queen forbade her daughter to stay in the house beside the pub.
Louise grew fond of Lutyens because, as she explained, he treated her like everyone else, he was not ‘a courtier’. That Lutyens liked Louise was a source of great annoyance to his wife. Like Alfred Gilbert’s wife, she became irritated by the beautiful princess who seemed to have dazzled her husband. The situation was not helped by Lutyens himself describing the irresistible charm of spending time with Louise; ‘one makes believe and has jokes innumerable’, he reported. Louise evidently was not ‘safe’ as far as wives were concerned. In the early 1920s, a young man named Herbert Ward was one of Lutyens’s pupils. Several decades later he recalled a story that Lutyens had told him:
He had to travel with Princess Louise either to or from Scotland. He inadvertently left his silk hat on the seat which she decided to occupy. A crowd of people had collected and she started bowing right and left. Lutyens took the first opportunity of explaining that she was sitting on his hat, whereupon, still bowing vigorously right and left, she whispered, ‘For God’s sake don’t make me laugh; for God’s sake don’t make me laugh before all these people.’ He was certainly very fond of her.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1896, Louise was concerned about her friend, John Everett Millais. The artist, who had become President of the Royal Academy following the death of Lord Leighton, had been given little time to appreciate the honour. He was suffering from throat cancer and his doctors knew there was nothing more they could do for him. In the May of 1896, Millais pretended he was well enough to greet the Prince of Wales at the Academy, though as the artist’s son would later write, by that date ‘the disease had made such rapid advance that he could hardly walk round the room’. Louise visited Millais, and his family remembered with fondness that, during his final months, she made ‘frequent enquiries’ and sent ‘lovely flowers’. The queen counted Millais amongst her favourite artists and told Louise to ask if there were anything she could do to ease the discomfort of her illustrious subject. When Louise, as instructed, told her friend this Millais reputedly replied that the one thing the queen could do for him would be to receive his wife. Ever since the couple had married in 1855, the queen had held firm to her bigoted conviction that Effie, as a woman who had caused scandal (no matter how innocently) by seeking an annulment from her first husband, was not to be tolerated. On his deathbed, Millais outsmarted the queen. She had no choice but to grant his dying wish and Effie was duly invited to the royal court. Like his friend, Lord Leighton, just a few months previously, Millais was buried in the artists’ section of St Paul’s Cathedral. He had died on 13 August 1896 and his funeral took place exactly a week later.
The end of the year was marked by a milestone for Queen Victoria. On 23 November 1896 she wrote in her journal: ‘To-day is the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English sovereign.’ The century was heading towards its close and, against all the odds, it seemed the ageing queen would live to see the new one. Already ten years had passed since her golden jubilee.
Throughout the first six months of 1897, the year of Victoria’s diamond jubilee, the royal family went through the same frenetic preparations as they had witnessed during the golden jubilee. Celebrations started in the middle of June and continued for a month. For Louise, as for all of them, it was exhausting, but exhilarating. One reason why Queen Victoria is often held up by historians as an example of a monarch who was loved by her people is the diamond jubilee. It was a landmark for both queen and people. They had grown used to her and, although she made far fewer public appearances than they had hoped, at least now, with the venerability of infirmity and old age, she had an excuse for her reclusive behaviour. The queen wrote in her journal: ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those 6 miles of streets … The cheering was quite deafening & every face seemed to be filled with real joy. I was much moved and gratified.’
The family, however, was unable to live without either a scandal or a tragedy for long. In January 1899, Alfred and Marie were celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with a family party at Schloss Rosenau, the castle in which Prince Albert had grown up, near the town of Coburg. Their eldest son, also named Prince Alfred, was just 24 years old and had fallen in love with a woman his parents disapproved of. During the family party, the young prince shot himself. He survived, but was very badly injured. Immediately he was sent to the Sanatorium Martinsbrunn at Meran, in nearby Austria, but he died there a fortnight later. Louise wrote a loving letter to her brother, reminding him of happier times and memories. He responded: ‘Heartfelt thanks for your dear sympathy in my terrible grief. You knew my dear boy so well and … know how lovable he was so that you will appreciate what a fearful blow his loss was to me … You remind me of Eastwell and all those happy days and how all my hopes are gone and crushed. It is awfully hard to bear.’ Alfred found solace for his son’s death in his usual way, by drinking. Louise found it hard to bear the knowledge that her much-loved brother had such an unhappy existence, married to an abusive disappointed wife and addicted to alcohol. A few months later Arthur wrote to Louise that ‘Affie is in great monetary difficulties. Mama and Bertie are in an awful state about it.’1
With the memories of the illfated silver wedding party still haunting them, it was a muted group of people who gathered at Windsor Castle just four months later to celebrate the eightieth birthday of Queen Victoria. The death of young Prince Alfred brought back memories for many royals of a similar tragedy a decade earlier, when their relative Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria had died at his hunting lodge in Mayerling; he was discovered shot through the head next to the body of his teenage mistress. Although this death was ruled a suicide, man
y believed that it was a political assassination, an attempt to bring down the house of Habsburg. Rudolf had been the son and heir of Emperor Franz Joseph I and his charismatic wife Elisabeth (better known by her pet name of Sisi). To add to the tension of the queen’s birthday, her eldest grandson, Vicky’s difficult and combative son Wilhelm, was angry not to have been invited to his grandmother’s party. When he arrived to visit his English relations in November 1899, the atmosphere was tense. The second Boer War2 had just begun and Wilhelm had made his allegiance to the Boers politically obvious.
Louise was now very much back in the public eye, carrying out royal duties and working tirelessly, with her siblings, to try and make up for the absence of their mother, who was growing more unpredictable as old age began to take its toll. The young artist and book illustrator Kate Greenaway met Princess Louise that year. She recorded the meeting in a letter to her friend and patron John Ruskin on 9 May 1899:
Then the Princess Louise came and I was introduced to her. She is so pretty and looks so young. I actually remembered to curtsey (which I always forget), and I was just congratulating myself on having behaved properly, when all my money rolled out of my purse onto the ground. The Princess laughed and picked it up. Wasn’t it nice of her?
Louise remained as unconventional as ever, and as charming: the artist William Blake Richmond told Louise when she was an elderly widow, ‘You could never bore me.’ Nor had Louise lost her desire to flirt, or her ‘flighty’ reputation. In 1898, Marie Mallet described a handsome man to her husband and commented, ‘I am sure [Louise] will … pounce on him at once.’
The royal Christmas of 1899 was spent at Windsor Castle, and Louise and her siblings spent much of their time knitting socks and scarves to be sent out to the soldiers, and raising funds for war charities. The wounded had already started to be sent home and Louise became involved in helping to set up special Hospital Homes for the injured troops, persuading people to turn their buildings over to the war effort. She proved how persuasive her powers of charm were when she managed to secure several rooms for the wounded at the Savoy Hotel (thanks not only to her royal connections but to her friendship with Arthur Sullivan). As the London Standard reported: ‘Princess Louise … has received from the Directors of the Savoy Hotel an offer to provide rooms and board for six wounded officers or non-commissioned officers, with nurses and attendants, free of all cost, for so long a period as may be thought desirable.’ She visited the proposed sickrooms to ensure they really were suitable for invalids as opposed to hotel guests, and reported back to General Wolseley that ‘they seem very suitable and comfortable, having two lifts to the kitchen and stillroom, two bathrooms and a storeroom’. She herself undertook to provide (and pay for) properly trained nurses and other medical attendants. She also arranged for one of the wings of Rosneath, her and Lorne’s home in Scotland, to be turned into a military hospital so that injured Scottish soldiers could be cared for close to their families. Once again she reported to General Wolseley and was thrilled that her home’s proximity to a pier meant the patients could be transported with the minimum need for painful movement: ‘the steamers can come up near, and the patients wheeled to the door of the building’. She threw her artistic skills into practical use, designing architectural plans for the patients and medical staff’s accommodation.
Louise had not forgotten the people of Canada; she also raised funds and arranged for supplies to be sent out to Canadian troops fighting in the war. Louise was always at her best when mentally and physically active and able to be useful. People knew they could approach her and ask for favours, such as the woman who asked for her help because her wounded son was in a hospital so far away from his family that they could not afford to visit him. Louise took this on as a personal mission, writing to her influential friends and querying why families were expected to pay full-price train tickets, something that could cripple their finances; she wanted charitable funds to be made available and, if possible, for men to be nursed closer to their homes. She understood, in common with all her sisters, the importance of good practical nursing, and how important it was to take care of the ‘whole’ patient, mentally as well as physically.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Louise had become more contented. The worst times of her and Lorne’s marriage seemed to be past, the queen no longer wrote of her worries that they would separate or of Louise’s insistence that she wanted to live ‘apart’ from her husband. As they advanced in years, people who knew them commented on what a good wife she was to him – although the steward who was with her for many years, John James, cruelly remarked when Louise was in her final illness that she had not been kind to her husband and was dreading meeting him in the afterlife. (John James had not known Lorne well and, as was usual for Victorian men, he seemed of the opinion that men could get away with pretty much any type of behaviour but women had to be patient and long-suffering and never assert their independence.) Marriage, for Louise and Lorne in old age, was the devotion of old friends, of people who knew each other’s foibles and forgave each other’s defects. They had been through a great deal together and knew each other as well as they knew their lovers. The couple had settled into a routine, accepting of each other’s independence and lifestyles. There are so many different types of marriage. Theirs was never the romantic ‘love match’ that the purple-prose journalists of the 1870s had proclaimed, but it had endured almost three decades of what had often seemed insuperable difficulties. As their thirtieth wedding anniversary approached, Louise and Lorne had learnt to live together and to miss each other when they were apart. He wrote letters addressed to ‘Alba’, his pet name for Louise, and relied upon her for advice. Their correspondence in the 1890s grew increasingly friendly and solicitous, evincing the respect of a couple growing older together and discussing their health problems and sharing witty stories. In 1906, after Lorne had been spending time in Inveraray, he wrote to his wife that ‘It will be heaven for me to see you again.’ Louise seems to have become maternal towards Lorne, writing to him as her ‘boy’, fussing about his clothing and whether he was taking enough exercise and attempting to lure him into eating, as though he were a child. Most notably in recent years, Lorne had been on Louise’s side through the crisis with Bigge, Beatrice and Liko; in return she had accepted him as the man he was.
CHAPTER 25
A new century and the end of an era
All my deep sympathy with you in the loss of one to whom you have so nobly and so long devoted your life
Telegram from Princess Louise to Joan Severn at Brantwood, following the death of Ruskin on 20 January 1900
The new century began with the death of John Ruskin and with depressing news from Africa. Despite her friendship with Whistler, Louise had not abandoned Ruskin after the disastrous court case; this was largely because when her brother Leopold was at Oxford, Ruskin had become one of his most trusted friends. Louise had remained grateful to Ruskin ever since (despite his years of unreasonable and often unpleasant behaviour, caused by mental illness, when many of his former friends shunned him). She sent a wreath to his funeral and a letter to his cousin Joan Severn, who responded: ‘My darling was so loyally devoted to you – and all the Royal Family – but especially to Prince Leopold – and your words would have gratified him.’ After the funeral Joan wrote again: ‘Your beautiful wreath was laid on my darling’s coffin while he rested in the church, and was lowered into his grave with one sent by G.F. Watts RA … and to-day I placed yours on his grave – at his head.’ The death of Ruskin, such a pillar of the Victorian art world, seemed indicative of the old being replaced by the new – in art and in society. Louise was embracing the new century, but she was keenly aware of how much the world was changing, how much she was feeling her age and how many of the people she loved were no longer alive.
News from Africa, where the war was still raging, was extremely worrying and Louise spent the first year of the twentieth century visiting wounded soldiers and attending fund-raising event
s in aid of the war widows and orphans fund. This was a cause to which many of her artistic and theatrical friends became allied, holding special performances and exhibitions to raise money for those families left poverty stricken by the death of the family breadwinner in the Boer Wars. Everyone in the royal household was exhorted to start knitting for the soldiers – even the queen took up her knitting needles and made warm clothing for her troops.
Louise and the queen also contributed paintings to an exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery, which Louise was invited to open. (Louise’s painting entitled Sketch of Botzen sold for 44 guineas.) The exhibition included works by some of the country’s top artists, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Sir Edward Poynter. A charity both Louise and Lorne had become interested in was the Gentlewomen’s Employment Association and they continued to show their support for general suffrage, and for equal rights for both genders. (Queen Victoria vociferously opposed this: when she heard that Lady Amberley had become president of her local suffrage society, she declared that she should be given ‘a good whipping’. She also complained every time one of her newborn children or grandchildren turned out to be a girl.) One of Lorne’s sisters, Lady Frances Balfour, was a prominent member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and her husband was the brother of Arthur Balfour. (Louise grew to have a great affection for Arthur Balfour and supported him in his political career. She became renowned in the family for her little presents; in 1916 when Balfour had a great many speeches to make and was sleeping badly, Louise sent him a present of Ovaltine. He sent her a witty and amused thank-you letter.) Frances had fallen under Louise’s spell as soon as they were introduced; an adoration fed by the fact that Louise was the first person to notice how much Frances was struggling with everyday life. She realised it was because Frances’s eyesight was failing and arranged for her to receive her first pair of glasses. For this, Frances would remain grateful and say that Louise had changed her life for ever.
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